Thursday, March 20, 2014

Till further notice

...I'm afraid this blog is on pause. Apologies to anyone this disappoints; personal and family reasons have called for a complete change in my schedule, and this blog, which isn't as high a priority as my fiction and which doesn't generate money, has had to be moved down the list.

If you're looking for something to read in the archives, I'd recommend the Opening Line series; you can find a complete list of posts here.

Thursday, October 24, 2013

There's been a hiatus...

...and will be for a bit longer, I'm afraid. Because of two interrelated factors:

1. Personal reasons.

2. The next book I plan to do is Moby-Dick. I'd never read it before I decided that its famous first sentence was worth a look; now I am reading it, it staggers me that I wasted the last thirty-six years of my life failing to read that wild, warm, wonderful, bizarre and beautiful work. I don't know what was wrong with me. Happily, I am in the process of correcting that deplorable absence. The thing is, it's a long book. An extremely long book. And being as wonderful as it is, I'm not going to spoil this first read by rushing it. So unless I can scrape up the time or inspiration to do something else in the meantime - any suggestions, go ahead - it'll have to wait till I've finished it.

If you're short of reading material till then, I suggest you try Moby-Dick. It is fantastic.

Monday, September 09, 2013

Opening Line: The Visit of the Royal Physician by Per Olov Enquist

This blog is undergoing revision; a temporary archive of the Opening Line series can be found here.

Johann Friedrich Struensee was appointed Royal Physician to King Christian VII on April 5, 1768, and four years later he was executed.

Sounds like the beginning of a popular history book, doesn't it? But in fact, this is The Visit of the Royal Physician, an historical novel by multi-award-winning Swedish author Per Olov Enquist. If the setting sounds familiar, it's probably because of a surprise hit film last year, A Royal Affair, directed by by Nikolaj Arcel and starring Mads Mikkelsen. Of course, it might also sound familiar because you have Danish connections; according to Mikkelsen, 'It's part of our history, everybody knows about it, but how many details is very individual. Everybody knows about this guy, Struensee the doctor, the German doctor who took over the country, had an affair with the queen, got a baby, and he got beheaded. But details - that's very individual how much you know.' It's a story the more remarkable for being true: an ambitious doctor named Johann Friedrich Struensee was appointed royal physician in Denmark to the then king, Christian VII. Christian was mentally ill, although exactly how remains a matter of speculation, and Struensee, an Enlightenment thinker in a country still based on serfdom, succeeded first in calming the king and then in gaining such influence over him that for a brief period, the German doctor became de facto ruler of Denmark. Struensee was prolific and remarkable in his reforms, which tended to be truly excellent ideas, but he was also rash enough to fall into an affair with the queen, Caroline Mathilde, and he evidently lacked the political skill to protect himself with alliances. Early in 1772 he was arrested and imprisoned, and an executioner chopped off first his right hand and then his head. It's a remarkable moment in Danish history, and it's also significant on the international stage. When the French Revolution began in 1789 its Enlightenment thinkers had a severe example to consider. This is what happened to a man who tried to break aristocratic power by non-violent means. Our guillotine for them, or their axe for us.

So the story is an intriguing one, and it's gained international interest in recent years. A Royal Affair is not, strictly speaking, based on The Visit of the Royal Physician; its makers tried to buy the rights, but they'd already been sold elsewhere and the film credits another novel, Prinsesse af blodet by Bodil Steensen-Leth, but Enquist's novel was influential enough that they had to double-check and do some rewrites on an earlier draft of the screenplay. (You'll have to run that article through Google Translate unless you happen to speak Swedish.) Most significant are the changes the film makes to Caroline Mathilde's character, which Enquist writes as ... well, as one of those female characters who are very obviously written by a man, primarily defined by sexuality and her instinctive rule over men, and while she's a well-executed version of that, to this reader at least it's a weakness in the novel, and the film's portrayal of Caroline Mathilde as Enlightenment herself is, if a romantic view, at least more humanising. But that said, the novel is fascinating - and it's not just because of the story. It's also a truly unusual feat of style.

Now, analysing the style of a work in translation is always a provisional business. The translator in this case is Tiina Nunnally, which puts us in pretty safe hands; she's another multi-award-winner, translator of another famous adapted work, Smilla's Sense of Snow, and she's evidently highly regarded in Sweden: it's hard to say which is the bigger tribute, her 2009 award for 'the introduction of Swedish culture abroad' or the fact that in 2007 she got to do a new translation of the beloved classic Pippi Longstocking. Any translation has an element of admixture - I'm sure the foreign editions of my books owe much to their respective translators, and I always remember the story of my friend's mother who first read Wordsworth through the translation of a famous Japanese poet and was deeply disappointed when she finally read the original - but while Nunnally had many choices to make about phrasing, the real feature of Enquist's style is one that survives translation. It's his use of flat, repetitive declaration.

The Visit of the Royal Physician is a deadpan book. Enquist is quite capable of metaphor and poetry when he chooses - Struensee thinks of the long-abused, confounded Christian as having 'frostbite of the soul', for instance - but he makes that choice only rarely. Instead, as befits the Enlightenment theme, the tone is strongly rational, confining itself to dry statement of facts - yet at the same time, it's fraught with emotional tension. In The Spectator, John de Falbe described the style thus:

Enquist writes in short, jerky sentences which often seem to repeat themselves. Although disconcerting at first, the technique works brilliantly. The atmosphere is suitably nervy, while the shifting ground beneath the apparent repetitions is vibrant with stealth and subterfuge.

While not all the sentences are literally short and jerky, he's right that it creates a 'nervy' atmosphere. I'd go further; I'd say it's doom-laden.

Fate and inevitability weigh heavy on the novel. Christian himself is a figure of profound pathos, a sane boy systematically tormented into helplessness at the hands of a court preferring to keep the king weak enough to leave their power unchecked; his preoccupation with acting and theatre, of which the film makes much play, is presented not as an aristocrat's vanity but as the utter confusion between reality and performance of a boy who has spent his entire life required to speak the lines given to him and kept ignorant of anything else. Struensee is, for a man who managed to revolutionise a country not his own, a curiously passive figure: it is Caroline Mathilde who seduces him and guides their sexual encounters, and his regency is unmixed with any desire for power:

It was as if he saw the aperture of history open, and he knew that it was the aperture of life, and he was the only one who could step through this opening. Perhaps, just perhaps, it was his duty.
And he was tremendously frightened.

Fear rather than ambition rules Enquist's Struensee, just as it rules Christian; Enquist's imaginative sympathy is entirely on the side of the frightened, and the Queen's fearlessness is presented as a strength of which Struensee himself is 'afraid', another way in which she dominates him. Struensee is afraid, and he's also 'doomed to destruction' because, as the Queen sees it (and the narrative tends to support her) he's too 'pure-hearted': fear, innocence and virtue are conflated, and those who do not fear, including the instinctual, physical Queen, have an element of monstrosity to them. The entire tone of the novel has a kind of impassioned caution, the desperate restraint of one who has much to say but fears to say too much.

We can hear it in the first sentence, though the style is so unusual that it takes a little time, a little practice getting one's ear in to Enquist's rhythms, before the emotion starts to strain through the facts. It deviates from plain history in one notable omission, for example: it doesn't say which country Christian was 'King' of. A popular textbook, especially one written in Swedish, would more likely say 'King Christian VII of Denmark,' just to make sure that everybody had all the relevant information at the outset. By omitting the reference to the country, the narrative assumes a certain knowledge from us.

Which, in turn, has a curious effect on the names. 'Johann Friedrich Struensee' and 'King Christian VII' are obviously formal, nothing anyone actually speaking to them would employ. But at the same time, leaving out that all-important location - it only crops up in the next paragraph, in which there's mention of 'the Danish court', still expecting the reader to do a little mild deduction, and even then it's only mentioned because it's about to quote the opinion of 'the British Ambassador to the Danish court', locating the sense of Danish foreignness in a character rather than the narrative - sounds as if, in some way, we were hearing about people we all knew. We hear their full names, but we apparently don't need telling who they are. It creates a weird sense of formality, a disconnected courtliness, as if the narrative itself is reluctant to commit straight away to calling them 'Christian' and 'Struensee' as it later does. Knowing already how Struensee's career ended - for this first sentence delivers him dead on arrival - it almost feels like reading a transcript, a statement to the police from a speaker not quite sure he won't be arrested himself if he says the wrong thing.

And we can see why when we consider the sentence's content. A man's 'visit' opens and closes in a few short years, and the close of his visit ends his life. Fortune's wheel is revolving fast in this world: to be near to power - as we must be as readers of stories of the powerful - is to be near to danger, near to death. Caroline Mathilde acknowledges this to herself in the reflection that:

To desire the queen was touch death. She was forbidden, and desired, and anyone who touched the most forbidden of all would have to die. It excited them; she knew that. She saw it in their eyes. And once she was aware of it, all the others seemed to become ensnared, ever more strongly, in an intense and silent radiance.

Enquist adds that this thought 'filled her with a tremendous sense of power', and as moments like this predominate when it comes to our insight into Caroline Mathilde's thoughts, you can see why I described her as feeling very male-written - but thematically it's central to the book and sexuality is only part of it. Life and death are intermingled, and to live too vividly is to court disaster. In a sense, the opening sentence links Struensee's rise and fall almost as cause and effect: had he not become Royal Physician, he would not have been executed. We open, in a sense, with the beginning of the end. (An impression that's heightened by the fact that the first few chapters following describe time after Struensee's death. Death hangs over Struensee before we ever meet him.)

In the face of this morbidity, performance and concealment are key: spontaneous expression tends to be destructive, as in the 'great furious confused rape of Copenhagen' that takes place in anti-Struensee riots, or self-destructive, as when Struensee sleeps with the Queen or his ally Brandt defends himself against a frantic attack from Christian, a defence that will later sign his death warrant. The narrative does not court such destruction. 'Johann Friedrich Struensee' and 'King Christian VII' are not so much naming the people as quoting their names, using an official version that no one could be blamed for saying.

It is, simultaneously, a sentence that speaks of characters more than of history. Note the order: not, 'On April 5, 1768, Johann Friedrich Struensee was appointed Royal Physician to King Christian VII,' but 'Johann Friedrich Struensee was appointed Royal Physician to King Christian VII on April 5, 1768...' The subject is the man, not the date. Now, this is a decision made by Nunnally, not Enquist; the original sentence ran thus:

- and according to my Scandinavian friends, it would have been grammatically acceptable to put Struensee's name at the start. (And the Danish translation begins with the date too.) Not being a Swedish speaker I'm in no position to comment on the subtleties of Enquist's choice - very probably it involves nuances of language and literary tradition about which I can say nothing sensible - but Nunnally's makes it clear to English eyes that this is a novel, and that Johann Friedrich Struensee will be at the centre of it.

There's an added ironic emphasis that shows up on rereading, especially when we consider the title. Struensee's execution takes place a few pages from the end of the novel, in a section that concludes, '...the axe at last found its mark and severed the head of the German royal physician; and his Danish visit was over.' 'Visit' is one of those words that Enquist charges through repetition, and when we've read the entire book, we can see its significance: the 'visit' is a fatal one, not just a consultation with a patient but his engagement with an entire country and culture which will ultimately destroy him. 'The visit of the royal physician' is, in effect, summarised in the first sentence: we begin with the moment he could first be called 'royal physician', and end where he ends. The 'visit' is, like many other words in the novel, a word that contains more implication, more weight, more inevitability than a single word can comfortably contain.

And it is, indeed, an uncomfortable read, linguistically as well as narratively. This is not a fault in the book: Enquist is evidently a fine writer and Nunnally does a fine job with the translation: discomfort is an effect it works to produce. To take an example: while touring Europe, Christian has a habit of smashing furniture in fits of hysteria, and Enquist describes it thus:

In the end [Christian] was practically certain that he was a prisoner who was being escorted, in a gigantic procession, to his punishment.
This no longer frightened him. But an infinite weariness encompassed him; he felt himself slowly sinking into sorrow, and all that could bring him out of it were the regular otubursts of rage, when he would slam chairs against the floor until they shattered.
The reports and dispatches were telling. 'There were few hotels along the travel route where a certain amount of destruction could not be found, and in London the furniture in the King's room was almost always smashed.'
That was the summary.

Look at the final paragraph, that dry, repressed sentence, 'That was the summary.' We can hear it it both condemnation and resignation. Yes, that summary is accurate and contains within it a swathe of destruction, and in describing Christian's behaviour, more hardly needs to be said. And no, that description is a summary and nothing more, and what it omits - Christian's inner experience, the pain that motivates him and the abuse that created the pain and the profound cynicism that motivated the abuse - are the important things, and a 'summary' that omits everything important comes out of a culture that is itself the cause of the destruction. A single sentence, isolated in its own paragraph to give it weight, both affirms and blames the summary, not disagreeing with it factually, but challenging it morally - but a challenge that could, if pressed, be denied. After all, it's just a plain statement of fact.

Interpretation, then, is key. The plain statements of fact are always understatements: 'It would be a long night. First dinner. Then tea. After that the masked ball. Then the coup d'etat.' And they're understated because they take place in a narrative that has already anticipated its end. We already know when we hear a comment like 'That's how things were at the best of times,' the worst of times are in view. More or less everything is 'summary', in fact; the closest we get to authorial explanation is the odd bald description like 'The atmosphere was charged and hostile, but courteous', a description that's once again isolated in its own paragraph, too frozen to expand. Expansiveness only takes place in the characters' private reflections, and the narrative voice just quotes them rather than confirming or denying. It's clear which characters the narrative prefers, but we have to deduce that from the evidence: it isn't going to tell us directly.

The characters themselves tend to be obsessives of some kind or another, often defined by epithets - 'the wine treader', 'the Silent One' - and ruled by single guiding ideas. It's a device more commonly seen in comedy, where monomania is the staple of humour: think of Mrs Elton's 'Maple Grove' in Jane Austen's Emma, for instance, or Madeleine Basset in the P.G. Wodehouse novels and her preoccupation with rabbits, fairies and God's daisy-chain of stars. Here, though, it's frightening: while comic characters amuse us by finding endless variations on their central trait, in The Visit of the Royal Physician, variation isn't possible. The 'wine treader' Guldberg, for instance, who eventually orchestrates Struensee's overthrow, is driven by a ferocious commitment to punishing the impure who have failed to appreciate his value, and when Caroline Mathilde asks him why he destroyed them, he quotes long sections of the Bible with the air of finally revealing his character. Christian's preoccupation with unreality isn't funny: it's ridiculous, but it's also a prison that prevents him from saving his friend. When obsessives jostle against each other, it's only funny if it's survivable.

Which, as we know from the first sentence, it is not.

Pulling off a trick of style like this, and sustaining it through an entire novel without boring the reader, is a truly remarkable feat. For Enquist's style to work, we have to read at a slow pace, listening for the resonances and echoes in apparently ordinary words. By beginning as he does, with a single-sentence paragraph that contains both dry facts and the history of a man's terrible fall, he slows us down. It's as if the book is saying to us, 'Stop. Tread carefully. Listen to every word I say.' Fate is hanging over our shoulder from the very beginning, giving every word an invisible weight. In plain language, we are told that we are on borrowed time, and like condemned criminals awaiting execution, we find ourselves in a world where everything is magnified as if it were our last moment.

Writing a work of historical fiction is always a case of compromise. Every era has its values that are held too deep to see, and a writer must balance their own era's preconceptions against the foreign preconceptions of the era they depict. At the same time, every historical novel is a novel of the present day: we interpret the past according to our own lights, and what we say of it, we say of ourselves. Struensee is an interesting case of this: the Enlightenment is an era that has shaped our own and most of us accept many of its new ideas as unquestioned truths; a man like Struensee is an easy choice for our identification. Yet at the same time, he must have had a will to power - nobody becomes head of state without one - and that sits uneasily with Enlightenment values: personal advancement is the stuff of aristocracy, and an Enlightenment ruler is supposed to be ruling for the sake of the people in the name of reason. It's interesting that a 1935 film of the same story, rather than choosing the more neutral 'A Royal Affair' or the straight-faced 'The Visit of the Royal Physician', was called 'The Dictator'; Struensee was, for a brief time, a dictator, and while his reforms seem to have been all to the good, the twentieth century has taught us to fear any man who claims to be dictating for the benefit of the people. Arcel and Mikkelsen deal with the issue by creating a Struensee mostly driven by human connection - by liking for the aristocrats who press him to apply for the royal post, by compassion for the demented Christian, by love and admiration for the enlightened Caroline Mathilde. Enquist takes our fear and relocates it in Struensee. We have nothing to fear from him because he is more afraid of his power than we are.

You can see a useful contrast between the two approaches in the 'wooden horse' incident - a moment that A Royal Affair must have taken from Enquist, but adapted. If you've seen the film, you may remember it: riding together, Struensee and Caroline Mathilde pass the dead body of a peasant strapped to a torturous trestle, his widow sitting hopelessly beside him and running away in terror when she sees the aristocrats approach. Struensee dismounts, tries to reassure the widow, then unties the dead man, releasing him in death from the horrible device. In the book, it is Christian who accompanies Struensee, and the victim is alive, in the process of being whipped, probably to death. Struensee tries to explain to Christian that, 'That's the way things are in your kingdom, Your Majesty ... An entire peasant class is sitting there on that wooden horse ... That is reality. Liberate them. Liberate them.' Yet Christian is too horrified to make sense of the scene, unable to grasp its abstract 'reality', and Struensee, faced with Christian's panic, is too afraid to intervene. The boy - younger than depicted in the film, his age is guessed at sixteen - is left to his fate. All that Enquist is prepared to acknowledge is the power of Struensee's values, 'something left that could not be chopped off' after Struensee himself has been beheaded and quartered. Actual people are not saved. Enquist's novel is uncomfortable with granting any moments of hope to the past: ideals and ideas alone are safe. It's one of those novels that is as much a hymn of praise to the present, or to the future, as it is a commentary on the past. Struensee, in the abstract, is the eternal intellectual, frightened by the pragmatic brutality of the world and more potent as a symbol than as a man.

You can see why this wouldn't translate very well into a film. A Royal Affair has many influences, and cinematically it's somewhat akin to Kubrick's Barry Lyndon: visually lush, verbally understated, steady-paced and merciless. When you can see the people up on screen, their inner thoughts can only be expressed by actors' performances, and to perform a character is to render them specific, intimate, more particular than symbolic. To shoot in beautiful fields and palaces is to treat of beauty and expansiveness. What Enquist gives us, instead, is the entrapping repetition of obsession and fear, a voice that lives in the little breaks between reason and madness that make an oppressive world. What we have in the first sentence is the novel in microcosm, an ingrown fractal of fate. A man is appointed, he is executed, and the narrative voice can add no rhetoric that could possibly communicate more than the bare events. We, like the characters, must see what has happened and draw our own frightened, confused, hopeful conclusions.

Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Opening Line: Persuasion by Jane Austen

This blog is undergoing revision; a temporary archive of Opening Line posts can be found here.

Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somerset, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs, changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century; and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed.

What's your favourite Austen book? Do you prefer the breathless romance of Pride and Prejudice? The poised sparkle of Emma? The involved drama of Mansfield Park? The warm, imperfect charm of Northanger Abbey? The witty, partisan suspense of Sense and Sensibility?

Or do you prefer Persuasion, that most-favourite, least-favourite, best or worst of Austen's oeuvre, depending on who you ask?

Jane Austen was a genius. In the days when the novel was but nascent, having no correspondence with any other writers, educated only at home, and beginning in her teens, she somehow managed to create a form of perfection, a brilliant, gripping, hilarious and polished set of creations that still enthrall centuries after the manners she parodied have passed. Few novel-lovers can think without regret of her early death, leaving us with only those half-dozen books to enjoy ... but among that half-dozen, loved as they are by both scholars and the popular market, which is the most loveable remains a question we can debate with some animation. Emma tends to sit securely high on most people's lists, as does Pride and Prejudice; Northanger Abbey has faults which most readers gladly forgive but openly acknowledge; Sense and Sensibility may suffer a little in comparison with Pride and Prejudice, but only a little, and we fall into it grateful for its existence.Mansfield Park is a thornier question; Fanny Price is perhaps the least popular of Austen's heroines, and the serious manner and pious attitudes of its hero lack the charm and virility of most of her other men. For all that, it's a beautifully written book with a truly marvellous structure, slow-paced on the surface but with an undertow as fast and forceful as any thriller: tiny incident adds to tiny incident and builds to some of her most extreme disasters, and the steady increase of tension is played with mastery. Likewise Fanny, if lacking in sass and sizzle, is a delicately-observed portrait placed in plausible circumstances, her timidity and caution understandable given her broken childhood and constantly-disregarded feelings, a heroine that Austen, finally calling her 'my Fanny', evidently loves. Personal preference being so much a part of reading Austen - another measure of her brilliance, for how many other great authors attract such intimate attachment? - I'll lay down my cards: Mansfield Park is one of my favourites, probably equalled only by Emma: for me, what it lacks in wit it makes up in psychological complexity, what it lacks in sex appeal it makes up in sensitivity, and its story draws me in every time.

Yet if we're talking about an engaging story, why do I not love Persuasion?

I have an exercise in mind with this Opening Line post. A first sentence can cast light on the rest of the novel, and it's the rest of the novel as much as the first sentence that interests me. Sometimes, it's good to re-examine the books that don't engage us.

Earlier this year, the Slate journalist Adelle Waldman ranked Austen's novels 'from best to worst' (in an order that I find hard to quarrel with, particularly if we're talking about technical perfection rather than personal preference), and rated Persuasion lowest. Accompanying this list, she posed the following question:

Why do so many of Jane Austen’s smartest readers consider her weakest novel to be her best? Persuasion, the story of kind, helpful Anne Elliot—who made a mistake years ago and is still suffering for it when the book opens—is didactic and full of crude, overdrawn characterizations. It is also the least funny of Austen’s books. The bad characters, whether snobbish, scheming, or hypochondriacal, are unwaveringly bad. (Directed at such easy targets, satire ceases to be satire. It’s more like gawking at roadkill.) The book’s good characters are even worse: boring, smug and, after a while, downright insufferable. Writing about a rough draft ofThe Watsons, one of Austen’s unfinished books, Virginia Woolf said that “the stiffness and bareness of the first chapters” suggest that “she was one of those writers who lay their facts out rather baldly in the first version and then go back and back and back and cover them with flesh and atmosphere.” Woolf might have been speaking ofPersuasion. Published posthumously, it has an almost skeletal feel, like an outline in which only the most salient points about each character are noted, as if Austen didn’t have time to “cover them with flesh.”

The essay of Woolf's she quotes does actually touch on Persuasion, in a slightly more sympathetic style:

There is a peculiar beauty and a peculiar dullness in Persuasion. The dullness is that which so often marks the transition stage between two different periods. The writer is a little bored. She has grown too familiar with the ways of her world; she no longer notes them freshly. There is an asperity in her comedy which suggests that she has almost ceased to be amused by the vanities of a Sir Walter or the snobberies of a Miss Elliott. The satire is harsh, and the comedy crude. She is no longer so freshly aware of the amusements of daily life. Her mind is not altogether on her object. But, while we feel that Jane Austen has done this before, and done it better, we also feel that she is trying to do something which she has never yet attempted. There is a new element in Persuasion, the quality, perhaps, that made Dr Whewell fire up and insist that it was 'the most beautiful of her works'. She is beginning to discover that the world is larger, more mysterious, and more romantic than she had supposed. We feel it to be true of herself when she says of Anne: 'She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older - the natural sequence of an unnatural beginning. She dwells frequently upon the beauty and the melancholy of nature, upon the autumn where she had been wont to dwell upon the spring ... The observation is less of facts and more of feelings than is usual.

Waldman theorises that Persuasion is rated by some notable critics as Austen's best work because of a general preference for the 'serious' over the comic. Woolf's analysis notes a melancholy and emotion in Persuasion which may have a stronger effect than mere prejudice against the humorous. Both may have a point, but I'm not sure it's the whole picture.

To me, Persuasion was hard to learn how to like - to the point where it didn't feel quite like an Austen book but like the work of a skilled ghostwriter. It's probably the least funny of her books, but that isn't wrong in itself; Mansfield Park is sober in its mien too and I've loved it since I first read it aged twenty. It's bitterly judgemental towards the 'conceited, silly' characters, but then Pride and Prejudice is thoroughly rude about the 'mean understanding, little information and uncertain temper' of Mrs Bennet right in the first chapter, and everybody loves Pride and Prejudice. What's the difference? Partly, I think, is that Persuasion is the angriest of Austen's books: as Woolf observes, Austen doesn't seem to be entertained by her characters. What laughter there is is scornful rather than amused. To draw out a single illustration: while Sir Walter's 'contempt and pity' are presented for us to judge harshly in the first sentence, it's also presented as a mark of worth that Frederick Wentworth, our charming hero, can be spotted turning aside from Anne's sister Mary with a look of 'contempt' not once, but twice - the 'contemptuous glance' he hides on the hill above Winthrop, and the 'momentary expression of contempt' when Mary presumes to whisper audibly that he must be 'delighted' to get an invitation from her father. 'Contempt' is the same emotion we deprecate in the ghastly Sir Walter - yet in Captain Wentworth, we are meant to approve it.

I'll focus on this word for a while, because it's a good demonstration of Persuasion's atypical tone. Using a Kindle search I find forty-four instances of the word in Austen (including variations such as 'contemptible', and including juvenilia such as Lady Susan), and in most of her other books, it's not a virtuous emotion. Emma denies to Mr Knightley that Harriet Smith's connections are 'so contemptible as you represent them', for instance, and the fact that she's attributing the word to him when he hasn't spoken it himself is a none-too-subtle accusation. Maria Bertram feels 'contempt of the man she was going to marry' - not entirely unfounded, for Mr Rushworth is a fool, but in that context the word is also a judgement on Maria: to feel contempt for a man whose fortune she plans to live upon is a sign of her own spoiled and selfish attitudes. Isabella Thorpe exclaims 'How contemptible!' in conversation: she is self-dramatising and affected, and almost nothing she says is sincere. General Tilney feels 'happy contempt' towards a man with an inferior greenhouse to himself, and 'contempt of [Catherine Morland's] family': he is a materialistic old snob. The word recurs a fair amount in Pride and Prejudice: Elizabeth Bennet discerns the 'contempt' of the Bingley sisters and accuses Mr Darcy of 'contempt' more than once; contempt is precisely the value Darcy must disown to win her. Elizabeth, too, fears the 'contempt' of society towards her family, and comes to regret her father's tacit encouragement of 'contempt' towards her mother.

Most of the time, in other words, contempt is a vice or a problem in Austen. Seldom is it attributed to sympathetic characters, and on those occasions, it's usually very carefully handled. Marianne Dashwood is prone to feel 'contempt' for people, but while we love her, she's impulsive and prone to over-reaction. In that context, it's not so much a sneer as a tossed head and a lifted chin, the sudden reaction of a high-minded but immature girl. There are only two instances of sound-judging heroines feeling contempt, and in both cases, it's felt in heat, not coldness: Elinor Dashwood feels 'angry contempt' for Willoughby, but only after he's cruelly abandoned her sister and is attempting to justify himself, and Elizabeth Bennet can't think 'without anger, hardly without contempt' of Mr Bingley's willingness to be persuaded to give up his love for her sister Jane. Anger and contempt mix together in warm-hearted characters - even in Persuasion, the loving but misjudging Lady Russell's 'heart revelled in angry pleasure, in pleased contempt' at the thought that Captain Wentworth is proving himself unworthy of Anne Elliot, thus confirming that she was right to talk Anne out of marrying him. Anger is always added in, a touch on the reader's shoulder to remind us that this is the 'contempt' of indignation, of outraged love for a third party, not of superiority. Yet when we come to Persuasion, we see it in the hero, twice, with no such qualification. True, he has reason to dislike Mary, but she has not been the main agent of dissuading Anne from marrying him, nor is she the primary source of Anne's low status in her family: the former sin rests with Lady Russell, the latter with Sir Walter. Mary is demanding, self-flattering and unreasonable, but she is not cruel, and of the Elliot relations that encumber Anne, she is probably the least bad. On the hill he might be excused for still feeling bitter towards the whole Elliot clan, but by the time of the invitation, his love for Anne has returned, and he's still contemptuous towards her sister. We may feel a certain contempt towards Mary ourselves, but then we are outside her world, aware that she is a fictional character, not required to treat her with humanity. Wentworth does not have that position. He is a character, and subject to our judgement to - yet because Mary is not admirable, we are not to question how well a ready contempt sits alongside a declaredly loving disposition.

The unmoderated language is far heavier, far cruder than we can usually expect from Austen. Compare it, for instance, to the beautiful turn that sums up a hero's dislike for a tiresome woman in Emma: 'Mr Knightley seemed to be trying not to smile, and succeeded without difficulty, upon Mrs Elton's beginning to talk to him.' There, we see a hero not just as a judge of character, not just desirable because his view of human nature is correct, but as a human being himself, interacting with others, trapped by good manners into a conversation that allows us to laugh in sympathy with his plight as well as with his opinion. Persuasion lacks this complexity; we are to accept judgements without being laughed into them. We do not get to laugh both at and with the heroes simultaneously.

I may seem to be making heavy play out of a single word, but in fact, Persuasion is full of such issues. Part of the problem is that, as Woolf points out, the book is light on dialogue. In every other novel, Austen can boast at least one or two great comic voices: Northanger Abbey has the playful teasing of Henry Tilney and the pretentious flutterings of Isabella Thorpe; Sense and Sensibility has the 'beau'-obsessed elder Miss Steele; Pride and Prejudice has the raucous Mrs Bennet and the weightily obsequious Mr Collins; Emma has the incomparable Mrs Elton. Even Mansfield Park, serious though it is, has the endlessly mean Mrs Norris exposing her dreadfulness every time she opens her mouth: we may not quite laugh at her, but we certainly see her hypocrisies revealed, and hypocrisy is one of the prime ingredients of comedy. But while there are distinctive voices in Persuasion - Anne's egregious relations, the hearty Admiral Croft - there is less irony in their delineation: even the nasty people are not so much hypocrites as they are just plain selfish, conceited and dislikeable. There is no Mrs Elton, no Mr Collins, no Miss Steele: Persuasion contains none of Austen's comedic greats. Added to that, Austen tells us a great deal more in her narrative voice than she does with conversations. The first chapter of Pride and Prejudice reads almost like a play script; the first chapter of Persuasion contains only a single, incomplete line of quoted speech: 'For they must have been seen together,' he observed, 'once at Tattersal's, and twice in the lobby of the House of Commons.' Austen, that pitch-perfect writer of voices, sings rather low in Persuasion. The narrative voice intrudes; the character voices suffer.

So, too, does the characterisation of her heroine. There is a simple problem: Anne, unlike the interfering Emma, the misjudging Elizabeth, the inhibited Fanny, the naive Catherine, the heedless Marianne and the misled Elinor, is never seriously wrong. Mr Elliott's courtship does not tempt her as strongly Wickham's tempts Elizabeth; her well-meant reticence is never truly unfortunate, as Fanny's is when she lacks the courage to warn her uncle why Henry Crawford is not a man to marry; unlike Emma or Catherine or Marianne, she has no moments of silliness; she does not even struggle, as Elinor does, with the keeping of a secret that leads her into unwanted deceits, or with the conflict between love for her family and fear of their folly - with moments when it's all but impossible to know what the right course of action should be. Anne's behaviour is consistently virtuous and her opinions consistently reliable. Yes, the novel's plot is based on a terrible mistake, in that she refused the man she loved, but that mistake is blamed on the 'persuasion' of other characters which 'was more than Anne could combat' - and even then, we are firmly told to believe her motives 'not a merely selfish caution', but 'the belief of being prudent, and self-denying principally for his advantage.' Anne is just a little too spotless. Austen herself acknowledged it in a letter to her niece Fanny Knight (LXXXIV):

Do not be surprised at finding Uncle Henry acquainted with my having another ready for publication. I could not say No when he asked me, but he knows nothing more of it. You will not like it, so you need not be impatient. You may perhaps like the heroine, as she is almost too good for me.

In this same letter Austen acknowledged that 'pictures of perfection, as you know, make me sick and wicked', and while she does not quite attribute this nauseating quality to Anne, we are not seeing the tenderness of 'my Fanny' here. Anne is almost too good - which isn't just a flaw in a character, but in the narrative: events happen around Anne, but characters' stories have a tendency come to rest on the issue of whether they value Anne enough in the end. Anne struggles with her own feelings, and she struggles to be useful, but she is a rather static point in the narrative, and as such, rather a drag on the individuality of everyone else.

Or at least, so she seems. There are reasons why the novel isn't universally popular: the dearth of dialogue, the 'almost too good' heroine, and the increasingly acidulated tone. It's a deft stroke, for instance, in Zoe Heller's Notes On A Scandal that Barbara, the lonely misanthrope, tells us, 'I have created my own traditions for the high days and holy days. This New Year's, as on every New Year's for the last decade, I bought in a bottle of sherry and spent the evening getting slightly sozzled while re-reading Jane Austen's Persuasion'; we can just picture her sighing along to the hopes of second chances and nodding in satisfaction as one character after another is condemned for failing to recognise the heroine's essential rightness. Yet somehow, despite all this, Persuasion is a novel people fall in love with.

Why?

Waldman's suggestion of humourlessness doesn't seem to cover it. Nor, peace to her ashes, does Woolf's reflections on the melancholy and the love of nature: they're part of it, but not, I think, the whole. The complex interactions between class and class are part of it - Persuasion takes in a lot of subtle social gradations - and so too is the hopeful message of lost opportunities redeemed. There's something else, though, something that we see in the action that outstrips any of Austen's other books. Persuasion is sexy.

The plot is rich in tantalising thrills. Frederick Wentworth loved Anne Elliot, and she, foolishly, rejected him, breaking both their hearts in the process. Eight years later, he comes back to the neighbourhood. They are often in each other's company, but cannot speak. It is clear he has not forgiven her - though to heighten the suspense, we as readers sense that the very fact he's still angry with her is a sign he still loves her; his passion has never cooled to indifference, and is ready to return given the opportunity. But because of circumstances, they have no time alone together; they can only guess at each other by watching across an unsuspecting crowd. The sexual tension surpasses even that of Pride and Prejudice, and the language, too, is sensual. Anne 'trembled' after an indirect declaration that she doesn't love Wentworth's rival. Recalling moments when Wentworth seemed to praise her, she experiences 'a faint blush at some recollections' - and how tantalising is that laconic 'some'! Austen's characters usually blush from embarrassment; here, though, is a character blushing with excitement, a warm revelation. Anne is even seen 'beginning to breathe very quick' after speaking to him. Physical closeness is felt: Anne anticipates Wentworth's presence by looking at a setting and thinking 'a few months more, and he, perhaps, may be walking here,' inserting him as a physical presence into the scene before her; she manoeuvres around concert benches to get 'within reach' of him; there's a ravishing moment early in the story in which Anne, hung upon by a misbehaving nephew, finds the burden suddenly lifted off her - a perfect metaphor for the role the Austenian hero plays towards his heroine, but also a moment of near-embrace, of sudden, unexpected touch in which his strength is at her back. 'We are not boy and girl,' Anne reflects to herself, and indeed they're not: with constant separation and the restrictions of etiquette to magnify every moment of 'half averted eyes, and more than half expressive glance', this is Austen at her most erotic. Compare Anne's gasps and flushes to the Pride and Prejudice proposal:

Elizabeth, feeling all the more than common
awkwardness and anxiety of his situation, now forced herself to speak; and
immediately, though not very fluently, gave him to understand that her
sentiments had undergone so material a change since the period to which he
alluded, as to make her receive with gratitude and pleasure his present
assurances. The happiness which this reply produced was such as he had probably
never felt before, and he expressed himself on the occasion as sensibly and as
warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do.

... and you can see just how far Austen has come. Trembling and rapid breathing have replaced 'awkwardness and anxiety', as if sensuality has come to life somewhere between the two. Lord Grey of Falloden's famous remark on Austen comes to mind:

Jane Austen is to me the greatest wonder
among novel writers. I do not mean that she is the greatest novel writer, but
she seems to me the greatest wonder. Imagine, if you were to instruct an author
or an authoress to write a novel under the limitations within which Jane Austen
writes!Suppose you were to say, "Now you must
write a novel, but you must have no heroes or heroines in the accepted sense of
the word. You may have naval officers, but they must always be on leave or on
land, never on active service. You must have no striking villains; you may have
a mild rake, but keep him well in the background, and if you are really going
to produce something detestable, it must be so because of its small meannesses,
as, for instance, the detestable Aunt Norris in 'Mansfield Park'; you must have
no very exciting plots; you must have no thrilling adventures; a sprained ankle
on a country walk is allowable, but you must no go much beyond this. You must
have no moving descriptions of scenery; you must work without the help of all
these; and as to passion, there must be none of it. You may, of course, have
love, but it must be so carefully handled that it very often seems to get
little above the temperature of liking. With all these limitations you are to
write, not only one novel, but several, which, not merely by popular
appreciation, but by the common consent of the greatest critics shall be
classed amongst the first rank of the novels written in your language in your
country.

It's a handsome tribute in its way, but he's wrong about Persuasion. It's quietly done, peeping from the margins, but in her last novel, passion literally breathes upon the page. Anne Elliot may be 'almost too good', but she is, to a unique degree among her literary sisters, finally and deliciously embodied.

What can we see of this in the first sentence?

Anne is more of a physical presence than a plot one in Persuasion: things happen to and around her, and only glances and hints allow her to shape her destiny. As befits a self-effacing character - the same thing happens with Fanny Price - we begin not with her, but with the people around her who will crowd her into corners. Sir Walter is not present during many passages of the book, both because as an individual he's too selfish to leave his pleasures, and because as a character he's too single-note to adapt well to every scene. 'Vanity was the beginning and end of Sir Walter Elliot's character', Austen tells us crisply after a page and a half of watching him play with the Baronetage, and when a character begins and ends with a single trait, their fictional possibilities are limited.

It is a well-sketched trait, though, that's for certain. Austen loves serious readers - you can usually tell who her heroines are going to marry on the strength of it - and never opening books, in her context, immediately debars Sir Walter from her approval. More than that, though, he's a man who only reads 'the Baronetage' - that is, the guide to the baronets of Britain. Now, while to be a baronet is definitely to be blue of blood, there's a sly poke at Sir Walter in her choice of rank: baronet is the lowest of the inheritable titles, higher than a knight but not a full peer. Later in the novel, in fact, we see Sir Walter cravenly courting the attention of his higher-ranking cousin Lady Dalrymple; he cannot be unaware that to be a baronet, aristocratic though you are, is not to be above the whole of humanity. But he screens himself from that knowledge: it's not a peerage he's reading, not a list of every rank of nobility. He confines himself to the Baronetage, pleasingly full of more arriviste baronets than himself that he can look comfortably down upon, where he need be troubled with no odious comparisons.

Sir Walter is, by naturalistic standards, nearly insane with vanity. He feels 'admiration and respect' for those who rank alongside him or slightly above him, 'pity and contempt' for those who do not - and to admire your equals in rank simply for being your equals in rank is mere extended self-love. We know this even before Austen's sharp conclusion to the sentence, the 'interest which never failed' in reading the dry summary of his own life - a life he turns away from the reality of, to read the official records about. It's clear from the beginning that his life could do with some attention: obviously he's an empty-headed man if he's entertained in an 'idle hour' by reading the same page over and over, but he's also ignoring 'domestic affairs'. A few paragraphs on, we see the extent of his madness: that he's recorded not only his daughter's marriage - seeing no foolishness in this emendation that can only be read by people who already know about it - but, 'most accurately', the 'day of the month' of his wife's demise. His good lady's death occasions no deeper mourning than a careful adjustment to his favourite page - no reflection except the desire to keep his image impeccable. Pride destroys any kind of health in his family, and at the beginning of the story has led him near bankruptcy. What we see, in fact, is the perfect image of a latter-day Narcissus, gazing entranced into his own destruction.

The structure of the sentence supports the circularity of Sir Walter's thinking. It's a long opener, the longest of all Austen's novels - a hundred and two words, in fact, nearly twice as long as the fifty-six words of its nearest competitor, Mansfield Park - and in its repeated 'there' at the beginning of each new clause, it achieves a rhythm that's either soothing or maddening - soothing for Sir Walter, returning again and again to the reliable, controllable page, and maddening for us, watching him find the same wrong answer to every question life throws at him. It's almost like listening to a mother murmur 'there, there' to a child, or rather, like watching a childish sensibility murmuring 'there, there' to itself, when in fact it has no right not to act like an adult. In the name of historical accuracy, I should admit that far as I can tell from Internet research, the phrase 'there, there' may not have been in use in 1816; whether or not it was a literal comfort phrase, it has the air of self-soothing through repetition. Self-soothing, and also mockery: we can almost hear the rhythm of harsh laughter. Sir Walter's opening line is one of circles, not progress: before we're told that vanity is his 'beginning and end', we know it rhythmically. Both in action and in tempo, he always comes back to the same place. And it's a place that narrows down. He begins by looking at 'the limited remnant of the earliest patents' (that is, the old aristocracy), then at the 'creations of the last century' (that is, more recent baronets), but he's not reading as an historian: he reads them only to compare with himself. Like his psyche, the sentence ends where it began, with Sir Walter Elliot.

Austen never begins with dialogue, but this is an unusual piece of scene-setting. Often she opens with a bit of family history, but Sir Walter Elliot, part of a noble family, is presented solo. It's a neat reflection of the way that, despite his preoccupation with family as heritage, he isn't actually interested in his family as a living unit: he's only interested insofar as it reflects on him, so while Mansfield Park begins with the marriage of 'Miss Maria Ward' and 'Sir Thomas Bertram' and Sense and Sensibility with the statement that 'The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex' - sentences about how families form and live - the Elliot family, in this opening sentence, exists only on a doctored page in a book. They do not interact; they are merely there in the record. Meanwhile Sir Walter Elliot is, uniquely for an opening character, actually seen in action. Northanger Abbey tells us that 'No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine,' and Emma that 'Emma
Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy
disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had
lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex
her,' - but these are characters in summary, not characters in motion. Sir Walter is in the action of taking up a book: not exactly as a single action, but rather as a habit, which fits with Austen's tendency to begin with generalities, but even so, the habit is that of single action we can easily picture. As befits Persuasion's more sensuous tone, the first character we see is unusually tangible.His repeated action is also, of course, the opposite of the book's narrative and moral drive. Anne marries a newly-rich man with no aristocratic background to speak of, and is glad to do so; being trapped in old patterns is a comfort to Sir Walter, but a slow death for her. Persuasion is a book of second chances - another reason it's so popular, containing as it does a message of hope that even when we think life is over, good things may still happen - but what we see here is a character for whom second chances are of no interest. He is too complacent about what he already has - even though all he has is his title, his debts and a family that aren't really happy and don't really love him. Unsurprisingly for a man of the domestic habits we see in this first sentence, his children and he have no strong connection: his eldest daughter and he rub along in mutual admiration of their own beauty and name; his youngest daughter displeases him by being 'coarse' from her discontent in marriage, a discontent largely lying in the fact that he has raised her to have so much of 'the Elliot pride' that she feels ill-used at every minor inconvenience. And then there's Anne, obedient but ashamed, in whom he takes practically no interest. We begin with the cause of Anne's problems, caught in the act of repetitively closing himself off from the harm he wreaks. This is the angry element of the book. To say that 'Sir Walter Elliot was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage' is an epigram. Austen, that famous author of 'It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of good fortune, must be in want of a wife,' was not willing to stop there. 'There' extends and extends, measured but hammering, until we are absolutely prevented from picturing Sir Walter acting with any credit under any circumstances at all. Condemnation overmasters laughter. The very fact that we begin with a character to dislike is new: while it's not unusual for Austen to begin with characters who are less than helpful to the heroine - Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park do the same - it is unusual to begin with a single individual who is not the heroine (as we begin in Northanger Abbey and Emma), but is a problem all on their own. Problematic interactions or settings have begun her books before, but while Pride and PrejudiceandMansfield Park begin with faulty individuals, all of them have some redeeming features. Mrs Bennet is funny, and her concern for her daughters' marriage is not unreasonable; Mr Bennet isn't very responsible, but he loves his Lizzy; Aunt Bertram may be lazy and useless, but she's fond of Fanny in her vague way; Sir Thomas may be heavy-handed and unobservant, but he's principled and well-intentioned. Sir Walter, mounted on his own like Catherine Morland and Emma Woodhouse, is a villain. There is nothing about him at all redeemable; the most you can say is that his vanity sometimes can be directed towards a less-than-harmful end. What Austen places before us is not a piece of family history or a glittering joke, but somebody to hate.
What we see in this first sentence, in fact, is deadly serious. Anne, famously among Austen heroines, is not a girl who may never get her chance at happiness: she is a woman who had her chance, threw it away, and now has to live in what looks to be a dreary and inescapable ever after. She's twenty-seven - the same age at which Charlotte Lucas marries the loathsome Mr Collins knowing it's her only alternative to dependent spinsterhood, the same age Marianne Dashwood declares is too old for a woman to ever 'feel or inspire affection again.' In carrying the first sentence into clause after clause after the initial swipe, Austen is presenting Anne's father - and thus her whole situation - as, literally, beyond a joke. Things have gone too far, too much has happened, and it's been happening for too long. It's no longer funny.

The plot of Persuasion is truly glorious, and its tenderness towards women past their 'bloom' is righteous. To this reader, it would have been served by a greater degree of polish - as the quotes above point out, Austen (like many comic writers) was a rewriter, and a refinement of the acridity, a bringing-forth of the voices, a gentle balancing of the partisanship could have made it truly great. Tragically, of course, Austen was already in poor health when she finished it, and would appear to have done what writers often do with an unfavourite project: she looked back, editing Northanger Abbey, and looked forward, beginning the never-completed Sanditon. Then she died, at the age of forty-one, and there were no more novels. Or, you could say, she died, leaving the whole world to her children and grandchildren, to every novelist who followed after her. Both are true.

Persuasion, from its first sentence on, is a difficult place to be. Anger burns through it; the writing is not ladylike but aggressive. 'If I am a wild beast I cannot help it,' she wrote to her sister Cassandra. 'It is not my own fault.' And there is a wildness to Jane Austen, a fury and a hunger and a vicious, desperate, brilliant imagination that only sometimes moderated itself into wit. Soon she'll be appearing on our £10 notes, thanks to the campaign of Caroline Criado-Perez, an irony we can imagine she might laugh at with greater pleasure: finally, Jane Austen will have contact with unlimited money.

She might laugh more sharply at the chosen quotation, though: 'I declare after all there is no enjoyment quite like reading!' Austen didn't say that. Caroline Bingley said it in Pride and Prejudice: contemptuous, pretentious Miss Bingley, feigning a love of books to impress the wealthy Mr Darcy. Nobody in Austen who truly understood the value of books would exclaim so showily about them. Wherever value is located, it is not in the declaration. Any Austen lover knows as much.

But perhaps, in a way, it's appropriate. There is no enjoyment quite like reading Jane Austen. Sometimes, reading her isn't quite like enjoyment. Persuasion, for many readers, is one of those books: it is too relentless, right from its protracted opening sentence, to read in comfort. But still, here she is, emblazoned on a banknote, mistress of the edged bon mot but stubbornly resistant to the soundbite, quoted with a pretentious incomprehension worthy of Mrs Elton, exposing a rich man to the ridicule of her readers. It's so ill a choice, making the Bank of England's governor look so stupid, that it's tempting to feel it could only have happened with Austen. One feigner of literacy quotes another, and Austen's many devoted followers, as one, exchange a glance and get the joke. You can't condense Austen down to a comfortable phrase, for what does she do, right at the opening of her last book, if not savage a man for being too pleased with himself and too happy to stay in his comfort zone? The bank should have seen it coming. Nearly two hundred years after her death, and Jane Austen is still making fools of those who seek to control her.

Monday, August 19, 2013

Opening Line: Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

This site is undergoing revision; a temporary archive of Opening Line posts can be found here.

My name, in those days, was Susan Trinder.

To take on the Victorian novel is no small challenge for a modern author. Nowadays we like to think of ourselves as liberated from the fusty formality of the Victorian age, with its apocryphal covered piano legs and its improving moral pap, but if we look at the actual history, we see something else. It was in the Victorian era that recreation became serious business, giving us laws that created mandatory holidays and railroads that gave us places to holiday in, and with leisure time on the rise and capitalism's machines a-whir, an explosion of amusements followed on.

There was a switch from locally-generated activities and community-based entertainments to increasingly officialised ones: national cricket and football leagues, public swimming baths, dance clubs, museums, exhibitions, arcade games, ticket-only entertainment events - the repertoire of public recreations to which we still adhere. Visual spectacles took on a new primacy. Like us, the Victorians loved staring at things with their mouths open.*

It was the Victorian era that gave us Grand Guignol and, in Britain itself, the 'Sensation Dramas' like The Colleen Bawn (1860), with its elaborate trap doors and wavering gauze and dramatic stage mechanics - or what we in our enlightened times would call 'special effects.' It was the Victorians who invented the magic lanterns that prefigure home televisions and the cinematograph, giving us the movies we still watch today. And the visual gadgets did not produce decorous tales, either; consider this 1895 offering of Edison's across the Atlantic, The Execution of Mary Stuart:

The Victorians may not have given us skirts for furniture, but they did give us the splatter film. And of course, they gave us something else, something to which every novelist owes a debt. They gave us the modern bestseller.

What do we know of the 'Victorian novel'? Even those who know Dickens only through his film adaptations, and to whom the names 'Wilkie Collins' and 'Mary Elizabeth Braddon' mean little, have some sense of what the great hotcake-seller books of the era involved. They involved grand, complicated plots with twists and coincidences and tangled family trees. They involved journeys through high and low life with reflections on the nature of society, sometimes radical, sometimes conservative and sometimes both at once, but they were always broad in their sweep. They involved spectacular villainy and eventual punishment. They involved falls and restoration. They involved shameless shocks and grand dramas and, as the phrase of the era had it, they involved 'sensation'. They were gripping but smart, personal but political, thrilling but comforting. They gave you your money's worth. They were big books.

They made a market into which we all now pour ourselves ... and they created a mold that only the boldest of followers tries to fill.

Enter Sarah Waters.

Fingersmith is Waters's third novel and the last, to date, of her three Victorian settings. 'The lesbian Victorian novel' is a marketer's dream: an easy soundbite that immediately catches the ear. In interviews, Waters herself shows the balance you'd expect from so poised a writer:

I'm writing with a clear lesbian agenda in the novels. It's right there at the heart of the books. And it's both at the heart of the books and yet it's also incidental, because that's how it is in my life, and that's how it is, really, for most lesbian and gay people, isn't it? It's sort of just there in your life. So I feel it makes absolute sense to call me a lesbian writer, but at the same time I'm just a writer ... I'm just writing stuff that interests me and feels important to me...

And somehow, the concept is charmingly fitting: what did sensation novels do, after all, if not look at the underbelly of life, peer into the dark corners, whisper of the unspoken? Homosexuality, though, was a step too far for most of them - or at least explicit homosexuality; as my Gender Studies supervisor remarked to me, 'When I read David Copperfield as a child, I was always very clear on who the real romance was between' - and the happy coincidence of Waters's natural interests and the appropriate sense of update that 'lesbian Victorians' brings to the field makes for some deservedly popular novels. It's a cool concept to sell, but it wouldn't sell if Waters wasn't good. And good she certainly is.

Fingersmith is the longest and most ambitious of her Victorian threesome, so to speak, more elaborately plotted than the picaresque romp of Tipping the Velvet, larger in scale than the bleak intrigue of Affinity, with a series of plot twists that leave the reader reeling in bewildered admiration. (And yes, I'm going to talk about them, so if you want to be surprised, read the book before you finish this essay. Really, do read it; you'll enjoy the heck out of it.) With the task she sets herself, there are certain things she has to do to make it work. The language needs to have an authentic period feel while remaining lucid enough for the reader to understand it without either losing interest or losing track. Every sentence needs to be both gripping and easy to follow: with so many strange events on their way, there is not an inch of room for minterpretation. It needs to be detailed and matter-of-fact: this is a book that rereading reveals to be rife with dramatic irony, but Waters plays fair and the clues are hiding in plain sight, remarked upon so incidentally that they don't stand out from all the background detail. And dramatic irony is strongly present in this opening line.

Linguistically, it's extremely simple: no word over two syllables, no phrase over three words, the plainest of all declarations - a character's name. Yet at the same time, there's a clear tension of time going on: the narrator's name may have been Susan Trinder once, but evidently it's something different now. 'Those days' have passed, that's what we know at once: we are reading a novel of a life lived in eras, not in a smooth continuum, and between one era and another, the narrator's very identity has been called into question. That's a lot of drama to pack into a small space.

There's another aspect to 'those days' that only becomes clear in retrospect, and in fact, it's central to the novel's theme. Fingersmith is the story of two changeling girls, the illegitimate daughter of a persecuted aristocrat hidden in a thieves' den and the child of a crooked baby farmer swapped into her ladylike, exploited place, and here, Waters doesn't just imitate the Victorian novel. She takes it on.

Nature versus nurture was a question familiar to the Victorians, and their novels reflect it. Though one can't simplify too much and it varies from writer to writer - Wilkie Collins, for instance, was firmly against the stain of illegitimacy and heroised the black cousin over the white in Armadale - there's a running thread of 'blood will tell'. Dickens, most famously, wrote novels in which natural virtue survived low circumstances and social mobility proved problematic at best; his later novels are subtler, but there's some justice in John Carey's swingeing description of Oliver Twist's impervious naivete in the face of baby farming, workhouse abuse and thieves' education as 'a hymn to the purity of the middle-class soul.'** While the popular novels didn't have an exclusively middle-class audience, family relationships are a central element to the Victorian novel - or at least to 'the Victorian novel' as modern readers understand the term - the question of a spiritual family resemblance, even without knowing who your family may be, makes for some interesting dramatic ironies. And it's dramatic irony on which so much of the Victorian novel rests. Sometimes the conclusion can be heart-warming: Rose Maylie, who loves Oliver Twist when he's just a friendless waif, turns out to be his aunt. Sometimes heritage can be risen above: Ozias Midwinter's agonies of conscience show him all the way through Armadale to be a better man than his murderous father, and despite his fears, he is positioned as Allan's protector, not his destroyer. Family connections may be many things, but what they aren't is irrelevant. Family, in the Victorian novel, isn't just circumstance: we inherit destinies and dispositions as well as faces and features.

Waters, on the other hand, takes the opposite line. Oliver Twist is an acknowledged progenitor - one of Susan Trinder's earliest memories is of being frightened by a stage version and fearing that Bill Sykes will come and get her - and in many ways, the story is an inversion of Dickens's concept. Susan, raised in the Borough, is a Borough girl through and through, genteel antecedents or not. Her speech is like that of the people who raised her, and so are her values: while she has more compunction about the meaner kinds of thievery than her foster-mother Mrs Sucksby, she herself says early on that this is largely because Mrs Sucksby protected her from being taken 'on the prig' and treated her with unusual kindness. That Mrs Sucksby did all this for cynical motives, planning to imprison Sue in a madhouse and retrieve her own daughter Maud along with Sue's fortune - that to her 'mother', she was not a daughter to be cossetted but an asset to be guarded until it could be cashed in - Sue does not learn until right at the end of the book. But while the knowledge shakes her, it doesn't change who she fundamentally is. She doesn't become aristocratic on learning that her real name is Susan Lilly; she is a poor girl raised among thieves but sheltered - in many ways, more sheltered than Maud, more used to kindness and less used to pain - and her guiding principle, above all else, is loyalty. She doesn't quite lose her warm memories of Mrs Sucksby; she stays fond of the simple-minded Dainty; she falls all the deeper in love with Maud when she realises that it's Maud who's done the most to protect her.

Maud, too, remains what she was raised to be: a strange, fierce, uncomfortable girl, the product of a ghastly childhood, capable of deep loves and deep hates and hard to subdue. Maud, Mrs Sucksby's daughter, has been raised by her 'uncle' - in reality Sue's uncle - as an amanuensis for his Universal Bibliography of Priapus and Venus (based, Waters acknowledges, on the work of Henry Spencer Ashbee). Maud has been beaten into bitter submission, living her life among works of pornography that mean nothing to her except a collection of fonts and frontispieces until Sue draws her desire; returned to her natural mother, she feels no tenderness for Mrs Sucksby at all. She notes that there's some resemblance in their faces, and it's not unreasonable to imagine that her tough-mindedness and intelligence are traits she got from her mother, but it stirs no sense of kinship. Maud feels herself to be entirely shaped by experience; of her childhood, she says, 'I am an amiable child, I think, made wilful by restraint'; looking at her uncle's bookplate design, she says, 'Sometimes ... I suppose such a plate must be pasted upon my own flesh - that I have been ticketed, and noted and shelved - so nearly do I resemble one of my uncle's books.' Left without means, she eventually supports herself by writing the pornography she was raised to catalogue, saying only, 'I find I am good at it.' Her education becomes her livelihood, and her heart remains unfilial.

The disrupter of experience, in Fingersmith, is not nature but more experience, and it's not family relationships but sexual attraction that begins to break the patterns imposed upon Sue and Maud. Surrounded by 'villains' of one kind or another, each is enticed into a scheme to betray the other, both ignorant of the enticer's real motives; neither is innocent in the literal sense, but both are innocent of the machinations of all around them. Each is, as Sue would say, 'a pigeon'. They are manipulated according to plan, but the plan does not include the possibility that they should feel anything for each other. They are, in the feminist sense, objects who through desire transform themselves into subjects: positioned to be acted upon, their love for each other closes an unforeseen gap and throws everything out of order. The 'unnatural' romance between them becomes the most natural human relationship in the book; the only one between major characters that is based on spontaneous feeling and, despite all the lies, the only one based on really seeing the other person: seeing the small details of her reactions and habits and passing moments of selfhood. Sue and Maud see each other clearly through a welter of misdirection, and spend the rest of the book re-learning how to trust that initial instinct that drew them together.

And in this odd romance, everything in each girl's life is a misdirection, right down to her name. Maud is lied to when she's told her name is Maud Lilly: her name is Maud Sucksby, though she never uses it. Susan's name, with which we begin, is even more fraught. Technically, her name is Susan Lilly, though even that is a little tentative: Lilly is the surname of her mother, and the name of her illegitimate father is never known. Going to Briar to trick Maud, she carries the name Susan Smith, and imprisoned in a madhouse, mistaken for Maud and fearful of incriminating herself, she insists at first that this is her real name. There are moments in the middle of the twists where it seems possible that she might really be Susan Sucksby. 'Susan Trinder', though, is a complete fiction. Mrs Sucksby has raised her with the tale that her real mother was hanged for 'murdering a miser over his plate'; the story is elaborate and full of details, and Sue finds it entirely convincing. (Though again, in post-Victorian style, she feels no particular emotion for this supposed mother: 'How,' she asks, 'could I be sorry, for someone I never knew?') The truth is, there was never a Trinder woman before Sue; the name can only have been plucked from the air as something likely-seeming. Add all this together, and Sue hardly has a surname at all. When she says, 'My name, in those days, was Susan Trinder,' that's really the best she can do. It sounds, at first reading, like promising drama, but it contains all the loss and confusion of her life.

The choice is a suitable one. 'Trinder' is a real surname with proper working-class roots - roots Sue doesn't actually have, of course - but at the same time, it's an unusual one, likely to be unfamiliar to many readers. The effect matches that blurring of reality that dominates the plot: it sounds at once real and unreal, to real to be true. It has the same sort of sound as 'prig' (meaning steal), the same clipped, staccato quality you'd hear in an accent that calls the police 'the blues' and describes the pronunciation of 'gentleman' 'as if the word were a fish and we had filleted it: Ge'mun'. You can hear it said in a Borough voice. Names in Fingersmith are all authentic, but they're also a little outlandish-sounding: John Vroom, Mrs Sucksby, Mr Ibbs, Mrs Cakebread, Maud Lilly. It's a nod to the Victorian tradition again, with its Quilps and Pecksniffs and Betteredges and Verinders, and Trinder sounds like the kind of name you'd expect a thieving girl to have. Actually the name derives from an old word for 'spinner', but if someone told you Victorian criminals called it 'trinding' to file the crest off stolen metal or substitute glass stones for real ones, you probably wouldn't be surprised. 'Susan Trinder' sounds perfectly plausible, and no stranger than anybody else's name. And that's the trouble with it, of course: it is plausible. It's plausible enough to mislead its bearer into a madhouse.

It's interesting, too, the slight note of formality in the opening. People don't actually call her Susan, as she immediately acknowledges in the next sentence: 'People called me 'Sue.' 'Sue Trinder' sounds consistent, 'Sue Lilly' a bit peculiar, but 'Susan' is a public name, an official one. I've said that nurture wins over nature in this book and that Sue retains some loyalty to her childhood, but there's also a note of distance about it, a slight caution about claiming it fully. 'Susan Trinder' was her full name, so she thought, but it's not as if we'd assume that 'Sue' was a shortening of anything else in this context; if she said, 'My name, in those days, was Sue Trinder', it wouldn't be inaccurate. What it does, though, is subtly disclaim the entire name, not just the surname. 'Susan' and 'Trinder' are opposites: 'Susan' was her name, but not what people called her, while 'Trinder' is what people called her, but wasn't her name. By setting the two in tension, this disclaimed identity feels a little unstable from the outset, as if it's become overheated and can only be handled with tongs. In the following 'People called me Sue' we hear the awkward balance between the two: it's at once the blunt statements of an uneducated girl and the careful precision of a girl whose very name is charged with lies.

The same applies to the cadence. 'My name, in those days, was Susan Trinder' is rather soft on the ear, the internal assonance of 'name' and 'days' drawn out by the comma that follows each of them, the setting much gentler than the sharp Ss and Ts and Ds of 'Susan Trinder'. Like so much else in the book, you can hear it two ways: it could be the elegiac grace of nostalgia, or it could be the jerky hesitance of a speaker not sure how to begin. It is, in other words, a deeply ambivalent sentence: an actress could perform it a number of different ways without straining the text. Sue shifts in tone according to the reader's interpretation, and the reader's interpretation shifts dramatically depending on whether we're encountering this book for the first time or the second.

What we begin with, in fact, is a nameless narrator for whom names are the starting point of a story. The book opens with a series of details about Sue's childhood, all with the feeling of background, and then Sue suddenly breaks off and addresses us: 'You are waiting for me to start my story. Perhaps I was waiting, then. But my story had already started - I was only like you, and didn't know it.' Sue tells us right in the opening sentence where the key to the mystery lies: her name. It was Susan Trinder - only it wasn't, and that's where her story begins.

Waters, in other words, begins the story at the beginning of the story, but until we know how it ends, we don't see why it's the beginning. It's a brilliant sleight of hand. The deceptions are indicated a little more clearly in the two sentences that begin Maud's narrative - 'The start, I think I know too well. It is the first of my mistakes.' - which befits its place in the story after the first major twist. Too, it has Maud's angry note in the writing; lady or not, Maud is a more aggressive character than Sue. Essentially, though, she is saying the same thing: I was wrong about myself, my self, all my life.

Waters tells us a tale with twist upon twist and revelation upon revelation, glimpses into high life and low, playing money at the root of evil and galloping through grand dramas and family complications in true Victorian style. What's modern about her, though, is her focus on how a character's inner life becomes shaped to her circumstances.

Modern, but not entirely modern. Oliver Twist was a very early work for Dickens, and he wasn't always that simplistic. The Dickensian brother of Susan and Maud is probably not Oliver Twist but Pip, conflicted and regretful and dangerously malleable in unscrupulous hands. The Victorian novel wasn't merely a case of shocks and spills; psychology and emotion were straining through it, and in Fingersmith, Waters was developing as much as she was subverting. More than most Victorian characters, her narrators discuss the effects of their childhood on themselves, but their basic theme - the relationship between an individual and the society in which they find themselves - is a lesson she learns as much as teaches. In this dark and convoluted story, she manages to be both classical and deviant, all without distracting the reader for a minute from the breathless intricacies of her storytelling.

Fingersmith is a profoundly educated book, but it's not, in the dry sense of the word, an 'educational' book. Waters's knowledge of her subject is naturalised until we are immersed in our strange circumstances just as much as Sue and Maud are in theirs. Nothing is flaunted; we are merely entertained. But the closer we listen to that entertaining voice, the more echoes whisper to and fro through its speech. The opening line of Fingersmith isn't a challenge to read; it's engaging, arresting, readable, combining classic and modern in a gripping new alloy. We read it for fun, but if we reread it, the deadpan subtlety is remarkable. To begin with a life at the beginning of a life is truly Victorian - but in true postmodern style - and so very appropriately for a story all about the dangers of myths and misinterpretations - how you read the sentence is far more complicated than the sentence itself.

Monday, August 12, 2013

Opening Line: Paul Clifford by Edward Bulwer-Lytton

This blog is undergoing revision; a temporary archive of Opening Line posts can be found here.

A reader request:

Request: You mentioned, back in the Opening Lines index post, that you might be open to the idea of doing some bad literature. So how about the quintessential bad opening line?It was a dark and stormy night. Could be fun.

In his essay on Yeats, T.S. Eliot observed: 'One of the most thrilling lines in King Lear is the simple, "Never, never, never, never, never," but apart from a knowledge of the context, how can you say that it is poetry, or even competent verse?' So it is with 'It was a dark and stormy night.' To talk about that famous sentence, we have to talk about its context.

Because here's the thing: on its own, it's not that bad a line. It's just incomplete.

'It was a dark and stormy night' is, in fact, the beginning of a much longer sentence that open the novel Paul Clifford by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. This is the full sentence:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents - except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of lamps that struggled against the darkness.

In context, you can see the problem more clearly, and it's not exactly the dark and stormy night.

Bulwer-Lytton was a tremendously popular author in his day; to quote George H. Spies, he's now regarded as 'perhaps one of the finest examples of a literary figure who was greatly revered during his lifetime and almost completely forgotten after it.' Even looking at that complete opening sentence, you can see the reason for both of these facts.

On the one hand, it's lavishly over-written. Before we've had time to catch our breath Bulwer-Lytton is pounding us with storms, rain, torrents, violent gusts of wind, rattling rooftops and struggling flames: water, wind and fire swirl all over the place, sweeping us into the novel in no doubt that things are going to be dramatic. The 'pathetic fallacy' is a common device in literature and describes the attribution of human emotions to the landscape, usually to express or accentuate a character's emotional state. This isn't quite a pathetic fallacy - 'violent' and 'fiercely' are just on the naturalistic side of the line - but it is, you might say, a stylistic pathetic fallacy. By beginning with such a ferocious setting, Bulwer-Lytton is telling us in no uncertain terms - and no succinct ones either - that this is going to be a story of extreme events and larger-than-life characters. (The story concerns a romantic highwayman, a subject that should surprise no one after such an opening.) This is one of the main reasons why 'It was a dark and stormy night' has become such a catchphrase: it's unquestionably purple prose.

But as a piece of scene-setting, it's also rather vivid. An inexperienced writer is usually well advised not to start with a description of the weather or the landscape: it can be done, and sometimes it can be done beautifully, but it runs the risk of beginning with a sentence in which nobody's there and nothing happens. This is not a problem Bulwer-Lytton faces: what with all the torrents and gusts and agitated flames of lamps, it's a scene full of movement and drama, almost cinematic in mood. Some of the descriptions are good: to describe the guttering of a flame as 'struggled' is really rather beautiful, painting a precise and graphic portrait of its movement, nearly as lovely in its way as the image of flames as 'dishevelled', which falls from such impressive pens as Donne's and Dali's.*. Frankly, as a writer reading that metaphor, my first impulse was to nick it and use it elsewhere (and I might just do that some time) ... but here's where I'd diverge from Bulwer-Lytton: 'struggled against the darkness'. 'Struggled' doesn't just convey the flickering motion in this context; it also conveys a sense of moral conflict: the 'scanty' flames are struggling against the darkness, as if sentient - and more than sentient, possessed of the same purpose as the people who lit them, as if lighting a human pathway was what a flame wanted to do. It's a handsomely Victorian idea - natural element as honest servant - but in terms of storytelling, it also manages to create some drama in a sentence without people. With characteristic speed, a person appears 'wending his solitary way' through the next sentence, but we don't need to see him to get the sense of things. What it's telling us, in fact, is that this is going to be a clash of good against evil.

Now, this is where some of the mockery comes in. It's an effective use of dramatic metaphor, but it's far from a subtle one. Consider, too, the quasi-archaic note of 'for it is in London that our scene lies'. Just as we're being advised that this is going to be a grandly exciting story, so too are we being advised to listen to it as a trusting audience. It's an almost-paternal aside, as if explaining to children hugging their knees around a fireside: it's 'our scene', not 'my scene', and we're assumed to be eager participants from the beginning. We have to accept this on its own terms if the sentence isn't going to feel like a jolly old uncle that nobody takes seriously: in effect, Bulwer-Lytton is forcing us to make a choice about whether we'll be naive readers or not right in the opening sentence. It's easy to make fun of him for this because it's hard to tell whether this is a conscious forcing: the sentence is so fulsome and races along at such a rate that it might just be a convenient aside. And if that's the case, it's easy to laugh at Bulwer-Lytton on the assumption that he's just gotten caught up in his tale without checking whether his audience is with him. We need our novelists to take their creations seriously or the prose won't have any sense of reality to it, but woe betide the novelist who's more convinced than the audience. On the other hand, we could just as easily slip into the role of Constant Reader, accept that this is going to be old-fashioned adventure, and be warmed at the inclusiveness of 'our scene': sometimes it's nice to hug one's knees and listen with simple faith. It could go either way, and the reader is unusually free to make their choice: Bulwer-Lytton runs a risk with this, and it would seem that it paid off for his contemporary audience but fell flat with later readers.

The fall probably has a lot to do with the fact that it's not the only aside. Our cynicism has been primed by a much clumsier one early on: 'the rain fell in torrents - except at occasional intervals...' While the description of those intervals that follows is pacy and vivid enough to distract us if we allow it to - this is prose written to be gulped, not sipped - that really is a bit of a clanger. When a writer throws everything into describing one kind of drama, storms and torrents in full flow, then checks that flow with an 'except' - and 'except at occasional intervals', which has a dry and pedantic ring that doesn't at all suit the tone - it sounds unfortunately as if he'd lost his focus. Loss of focus never looks good, but when it happens between one kind of extreme and another, with a qualification in the middle that smacks more of the inkstain and pince-nez than the swash and buckle, the effect is unavoidably bathetic. To convey broken action needs smooth writing, and Bulwer-Lytton's sentence is in too much of a hurry. Consider, for instance, this lightly-edited version:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents. Violent gusts of wind swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of lamps that struggled against the darkness.

While a little jerky - I'm just removing words, not adding any to counterbalance their loss - it conveys the same information without that bump in the middle. It avoids the comedic glitch - but at the same time it loses some of the enjoyably breathless pace. (One can't fix a problem like that simply by trimming: one has to rewrite, and that's not my task here.) If Bulwer-Lytton had broken his first sentence into two the way I have, it probably wouldn't have become so notorious - but that's partly because it wouldn't have been so interesting.

Unfortunately for Bulwer-Lytton, it's also easy to imitate. Take a look at this year's Bulwer-Lytton Contest winners - the prize for writing a bad opening sentence to a non-existent novel - and you'll see a lot of it: Alanna Smith, Rachel Flanigan, Maggie Lyons, Ward Willats, Kathryn Nelson, Jackie Fuchs, John Glenn and Kevin Fry all use the awkward aside or qualification to some degree. The combination of high drama and sudden change is not a felicitous one, and if you're looking to parody, that's a simple device to copy.

Yet it's not this, the worst point in the sentence, that gets most often quoted. The bit people remember is 'It was a dark and stormy night.' Of course, that's the beginning of the sentence and an audience familiar with Bulwer-Lytton would know what 'It was a dark and stormy night...' denoted, but what it's become by now is an in-joke detached from its source: more people know it from Snoopy than from Bulwer-Lytton. (For those who don't know it from Snoopy: the Peanuts beagle is perpetually writing a bad novel, and 'It was a dark and stormy night' is one of the sentences we know it contains.) There's even a board game named after it. Other writers, though, have taken it on as a challenge - famously, Madeleine L'Engle used it as the opening sentence of A Wrinkle In Time, a book that's considered a classic of its kind. It's the foundation of a circular story popular with children; there are various versions, but the one my dad used to tell me went: 'It was a dark and stormy night. Three robbers sat in a cave. Two said to one, 'Come on Bill, tell us a story,' and so Bill began: "It was a dark and stormy night. Three robbers sat in a cave..."'** And it's worth remembering that such stories are told partly as chants just for the pleasure of their rhythm: it would never have stuck if 'It was a dark and stormy night' wasn't a satisfying phrase to recite. By now, the phrase is more a shorthand for bad writing than an example of it, and not every use of it looks badly written. So, what can we say about the actual sentence as it exists in popular culture? What can we make of it, shaved of its context?

Really, it isn't that bad. As L'Engle and the chanting game show, it can sound pretty good in the right setting. It has a decent dramatic rhythm, a trisyllablic drumroll leading to some good solid iambs: 'It was a dark and stormy night.' It contains no particular howlers. If it has a flaw, it's that it would be a weak opening on its own because nothing happens in it except weather, described by two fairly plain and unimaginative adjectives (though you can't accuse the original sentence of these failings). 'Dark and stormy' is easy to understand, but at the same time non-specific: what is described is the sky and air, not the ground and people, so there's not much going on. Its problem, such as it is, is actually opposite to the problems of the full Bulwer-Lytton sentence: overblown though the latter may be, it's crammed with motion and imagery and scene-setting, and even with no people present, it tells us very clearly indeed what kind of book we're going to read. If this wasn't going to be a story about a highwayman, it'd have to have a gang of robbers or a circle of spies or something equally in that vein: we know what kind of people are going to populate this book well before we know their exact profession. In the context of that high-adventure-in-low-places intensity, 'It was a dark and stormy night' is practically disposable. To say a night is dark is not really necessary - some nights are darker than others, of course, but you could do without the word, especially when Bulwer-Lytton ends his sentence with 'darkness'. When rain is falling in torrents, you don't really need to know that it's 'stormy'. At root, it's faulty because while it's tonally dramatic, it's verbally flat: in context, it's a bit redundant, and out of context, it doesn't have the energy that we're supposed to be picturing in the stormy skies it indicates. Linguistically, it's like singing quietly about a loud noise. It informs, but it doesn't convey.

Now, in itself, that isn't much of a crime. Plenty of fiction, plenty of it perfectly adequate, has plenty of sentences like that scattered throughout their central sections. The problem here is that it's not the way to get a story on the move. If you've ever seen the film Throw Momma From the Train, you may remember Billy Crystal's character being chronically stuck over whether to begin his novel 'The night was hot' or 'The night was moist' (only to be driven to a final murderous rage when the harridan Momma produces the maddeningly perfect solution: 'The night was sultry.') Probably that's a nod to Bulwer-Lytton, but it's also an illustration of writer's block: if you begin by describing the climate, you'd better have a good idea about where to go from there or you've got nothing.

Fundamentally, 'It was a dark and stormy night' is a sentence that doesn't suggest a plot. It suggests an atmosphere - not very graphically when split from all Bulwer-Lytton's more flourishing additions - but it doesn't give you anything to expect. The art of novel writing is the art of building sentence upon sentence, and a good sentence suggests to the writer what the next should be. That's why Throw Momma From the Train's dramatisation is so deft: if you're trying to get your brain working, talking about what kind of night it was probably isn't going to help you. Sentences need to make things, to introduce and build and create, and there's nothing in 'It was a dark and stormy night' that you can grasp to get a hand-hold up to the next one.

And that, I suspect, is why it's so popular as a joke sentence. Fiction is highly specific: every sentence tells you something about where you are, who's doing what, what's going on, and even badly-written fiction contains particulars. The world is full of badly-written sentences, but they're usually badly-written sentences about something, and as such don't stand in very well for all bad sentences. Every unhappily-phrased sentence is unhappy in its own way, as Tolstoy probably wouldn't say, and when one wants a shorthand, the many different varieties of unhappiness are a nuisance. 'It was a dark and stormy night,' though, a phrase that tells us almost nothing and could lead almost anywhere, is usefully generic. In itself, 'It was a dark and stormy night' is nothing worse than mediocre. For it to be truly hopeless, it has to be detached from its context to become meaningless.

But of course, that's not how it was actually written. You might as well say that 'Shall I compare thee to a sum?' is bad love poetry: once you start removing sections, it's no longer the author's fault if the thing doesn't work. It may not be the most evocative phrase in the sentence and it conveys little in itself, but that's exactly why Bulwer-Lytton didn't end the sentence there: to cut it down is to reduce the frantic profusion that makes it what it is. And what it is, frankly, is enjoyable, not as a sophisticated pleasure but as an enthusiastic piece of unselfconscious romanticism. You can read it generously or ungenerously, and it allows for both options, and if there's some 'perfervid turgidity', as Professor Scott Rice has it, there is also a bravura that deserves its due.

In many ways, being turned into a cliche is a compliment to a writer. A cliche is simply a phrase that's been repeated too often. Shakespeare's plays have given the language innumerable sayings, from 'high and mighty' to 'a rose by any other name'; you don't sound original saying them nowadays, but that's because they redound to Shakespeare's credit, not yours. 'It was a dark and stormy night' has its flaws as a piece of literature, but it's punchy and, as a result, famous. And if it doesn't convey very much by itself, that's by design. It's just by the design of people who needed something generic and cropped it accordingly. 'It was a dark and stormy night' is as much the creation of Good Read Games and everybody who's ever quoted it out of context as it it is of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and it was created, not to serve as the first sentence of a novel, but to serve as an anti-sentence, a sentence stripped down until everyone could agree it was bad.

Really, though, its badness is as much a social fiction as a literary one. There are many worse sentences. What it possesses is a the right combination of qualities for the purpose required: it's short, it's simple, and it's non-specific. Of those qualities, only about fifty per cent can be attributed to its actual author. The rest is cultural rendering, reducing it down to an easily-packaged soundbite.

It's been observed that the jokes in crackers tend to be groaningly awful. ('What do short-sighted ghosts wear? Spooktacles!' 'What did the policeman say to his tummy? You're under a vest!') It's also been observed that there's a reason for this: their purpose is to unite people during a family ritual, and one that can include people who don't see each other that often, know each other that well, or even like each other that much. Different people have different senses of humour, and the chances of every member of every family that buys a box of crackers finding the same good joke equally funny are slim. If some people laugh and some don't, the family is, however subtly, divided in the middle of a feast that's supposed to bring them together. What will unite people is something nobody finds funny, a comedic common enemy; if you can't agree with your brother-in-law about anything else, you can at least bask in the brief harmony of agreeing that 'What do you get if you cross a duck and a reindeer? A Christmas quacker!' is a terrible joke. So the cracker manufacturers who add these paper slips with wince-inducing puns are not actually trying to amuse us, or at least, not to amuse us with the jokes themselves. They're trying to get us to wince in unison.

And that, basically, is the purpose 'It was a dark and stormy night' serves: a literary common enemy created by people whose main interest was in speaking generically of 'bad books' rather than of any one book in particular. It's not about the books, it's about the people talking about the books: not artistic expression, but social currency. For that purpose, a sentence doesn't have to be really bad. In fact, it can't afford to be really truly bad: awkward, unnatural, clunky phrasing doesn't stick in our minds as well as something neat and snappy, and there's nothing more moribund than a catchphrase that's hard to remember. To serve the function that 'It was a dark and stormy night' does, it doesn't have to be bad, it has to be memorable. Yet at the same time, it has to be non-specific: if it hinted at anything about plot, genre or characters, then there'd always be some bugger popping up to say, 'You know, I wouldn't mind reading a book that started like that...' and there goes the harmony. Once it's been repeated often enough, it stops meaning 'It was a dark and stormy night'; it takes on the social meaning of 'I'm a terrible opening sentence', and its actual content doesn't matter that much. It could have been done to any number of sentences. 'It was a dark and stormy night' is just the one we happen to have. But when you think about it, remaining memorable after being pruned of almost all your meaning is quite an achievement. Honestly, I think Bulwer-Lytton deserves some plaudits.

So, to answer the question: In literary terms, 'It was a dark and stormy night' is not a quintessentially bad opening line. It's a proverbially bad opening line - and that's quite a different beast.

*Tip o' the nib to mmy for pointing out Dali's description of Federico Garcia Lorca's verse ('I felt the incendiary and communicative fire of the poetry of the great Federico rise in wild, dishevelled flames...'), and to Amaryllis for reminding me of Donne's 'To the Countess of Salisbury, August, 1614':

Fair, great, and good, since seeing you we seeWhat Heaven can do, and I what any earth can be;Since now your beauty shines, now, when the sun,Grown stale, is to so low a value runThat his dishevelled beams and scattered firesServe but for ladies' periwigs and tiresIn lovers' sonnets, you come to repairGod's book of creatures, teaching what is fair...

Thank you both; I knew I'd seen that image somewhere, but it was nagging at me that I couldn't place it.

**On the other hand, my mother's version was, 'It was a dark and stormy night, and the rain came down in torrents. The Captain said to the mate, "Spin us a yarn, Joe," and Joe began as follows..." I quote my dad's purely because it's the one I remember from childhood, not out of preference for either version or, indeed, either parent. Interestingly, when I told my mum I was doing a post on the 'It was a dark and stormy night,' she assumed that I meant the beginning of the Captain-said-to-the-mate story; like many people who recite those little loops, it was the only version she knew.